United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

The UNODC Regional Office in East Africa (ROEA)

The Police Reforms Roadmap

A Guide

The Police Reforms Roadmap is the mechanism through which important messages on police reforms are cascaded down to the frontline of policing in Kenya, and to the wananchi .

When will the Roadmap be delivered?

The preparation phase begins in earnest in October 2015, with roll out expected from January 2016.  Current funding to the Basket Fund - which is supporting roll out - will end in December 2016, by which point the NPS will take stock of Roadmap accomplishments and/or shortcomings.

Why is the Roadmap necessary?

Acts of Parliament reformed the policing architecture in Kenya in 2011, including a National Police Service Act. To implement the NPS Act, a number of regulations, policies and protocols have been developed, or are being developed. They include - but are not limited to - a Strategic Plan, Service Standing Orders, a Communication Policy, a Human Resources Framework, a Gender Mainstreaming Policy, and (to be finalized by December 2015) a Human Rights Strategy and an Anti-Corruption Strategy. These documents complement other reforming directives on deployment and transfer, use of small arms, and fleet management, for example.

The NPS observes that awareness of all reforming initiatives to date have been HQ-centric, and have not reached the front line of policing. Initiatives which take the reforming message to the police station level have been limited, and consequently there are few serving police officers in the counties who are aware of the content of the reforming documents.

Hence, there is a need to implement a Police Reforms Roadmap, to take the reform movement out of Nairobi, to the locations all over Kenya where the police and the public intersect: at the police station, post or camp.

How does the Roadmap connect with the NPS priorities?

The Roadmap responds to the following 3 objectives and 6 outcome indicators described in the pre-published version of the Police Reforms Programme Document (2015-18):

What messages will the Roadmap deliver?

The Roadmap will deliver messages contained within official reforming documents.  Beginning in October 2015, a team of NPS officers will review all reforming documents to select the messages which officers on the ground should know, and which they should incorporate into their everyday work. At the end of this process, the NPS team will arrive at a Police Reforms Training Toolkit and a Reforms Handbook.

What is the Police Reforms Training Toolkit, and what is the Reforms Handbook?

The Police Reforms Training Toolkit, which will be developed and finalized by 20 NPS officers over 2 retreats in October and November 2015, will comprise a teaching guide on the police reforms movement in Kenya. It will include all salient messages from the NPS reforming documents.  The Toolkit will be designed for delivery over a 4-day period, and should be accessible and relevant to officers on the front line of policing in Kenya. It will comprise learning modules, learning objectives and recommended lesson plans.

The content and key messages contained in the Training Toolkit will also be incorporated into a Reforms Handbook. The Reforms Handbook will be professionally produced, and distributed at the police station/post/camp level. It will serve as an accessible and quick reference manual for police officers on the key reforming messages.

Who will implement the Police Reforms Training Toolkit?

A 'Train the Trainer' course will be delivered over a 5-day period starting in December 2015. The facilitator of the course will be a Basket Fund technical specialist, and the recipients of the training will be the NPS National Reform Champions who will be responsible for implementing the Roadmap sensitization campaign throughout 2016.

Who are the NPS National Reform Champions?

They are 20 officers, identified by the Inspector General, who will serve as custodians of the reform messages throughout 2016. They will be, where possible, officers who served on the drafting committees/working group for each reforming document, but will also number members of the staff training colleges, and personnel who sit on the transformation team.

How will the message of reform be disseminated?

The Roadmap sensitization campaign will use a 'cascading' methodology to reach the front line - and the first to be sensitized are the 20 NPS National Reform Champions described above.

Second, the National Reform Champions will deliver the Toolkit to the most senior officers within NPS Headquarters, to ensure full knowledge and support for the programme at the level of senior management.

Third, the National Reform Champions will target the counties, and will do so through 'clusters'. A 'cluster' is no more than a geographic convenience which allows for 6-8 counties to be brought together at an appropriate location. Each county will send 6-8 members of the county police command to the cluster workshop - one of which will be designated by the Inspector General as officer-in-charge of reforms in his/her county.

In total, 9 cluster workshops will take place, all in January-March 2016, all for 4-days each. One additional cluster workshop will be convened for the leadership of the police staff training colleges.

And how will the reform messages reach the frontline of policing?

Under the supervision of the county commander, the Police Reforms Toolkit will be implemented at the police station level. County commanders, or their designee, will travel the county and will deliver the Training Toolkit and the Reforms Manual to police stations/posts/camps under their jurisdiction.

They will then conduct follow up visits to those locations to support the police station commander in implementation of the reforms. In doing so, they will be supported by the 20 NPS National Reform Champions, who will function as 'mobile mentors', travelling from county to county to support and troubleshoot the implementation process.

The National Reform Champions will also periodically convene review meetings, to bring together the county focal points in order to share lessons learnt and methods that have been successful in over-coming obstacles.

How many police locations and officers will be targetted?

Throughout Kenya, there are 441 police stations, 252 police posts and 362 patrol bases. The 'frontline' therefore comprises 1,055 police locations, and an estimated 90,000 police officers, across 47 counties.

The delivery period is May to August 2016, thereby allowing time for the NPS to take stock of Roadmap accomplishments and/or shortcomings (between September and November 2016), in preparation for a follow up phase of implementation. The NPS will settle on a target number of police locations and police officers that is attainable within this delivery window.

How will the Roadmap turn sensitization into action?

In the development of the Training Toolkit, the NPS will identify a series of Action Points which are drawn from each of the respective reforming documents. An Action Point is defined as an implementation requirement for a designated police commander in order to integrate structural/behavioural change into everyday operations which are under their control. The Action Point may apply to police leadership at either the national, county or police station level.  When collated into an Action Point Workplan, those Action Points will form the basis of the Roadmap Monitoring and Evaluation Framework.

This Action Point Work Plan may apply to Stage 1 of the police reform process; in future stages of the reform process, the Work Plan may evolve to include additional Action Points, still drawn from the reforming documents, which would seek to further embed the reforming principles and culture described in each of the reforming documents.

The Action Point Work Plan may also be integrated into police officers' performance management targets, and knowledge/awareness of the reforming documents may also be integrated into the testing schedule for police officers seeking to qualify for promotion.

How will impact be measured?

A Monitoring and Evaluation Framework will be built around the Action Point Work Plans described above, supported by the Basket Fund.  Indicators will be anchored in the Action Points themselves.

The Basket Fund will provide mentoring support to the NPS M&E department, and to the NPS Police Reforms Directorate, to strengthen the internal mechanisms of data collection, and to begin the process of escalating data from police stations, via the county staffing officers into a centralised database at HQ.

The Basket Fund will then support the implementation of an impact assessment at the local, county and national levels to measure the implementation of the Action Point Work Plans using the leading indicator M&E Framework.

And what about the  wananchi?

An 'Action Point' for each police station commander will include the requirement to implement a sensitization forum on police reform for the benefit of their local community. This will take the reform process down to the end user, the beneficiaries that the National Police Service is intended to serve, and will support implementation of the Inspector General's concept of People-Centred Policing.

Materials will be developed to support the community fora, including cartoon posters which carry key messages from the Reforms Handbook, and which may be placed on police stations, etc.